


Stricken

by belladeum



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: (he gets hit by lightning and someone else dies i mean that's violent right?), (sorta. he's just a typical laddish lad really), (they're just folk caught up in the storm), Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Misfits (TV 2009) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Background Character Death, England-Centric (Hetalia), Family Issues, GerEng Week, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Inspired by Misfits (TV 2009), M/M, Minor Character Death, Punk England (Hetalia), Superpowers, Weight Issues, humantalia, implied/referenced eating disorder, or rather, two lonely boys meet under bizarre circumstances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 06:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21387871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belladeum/pseuds/belladeum
Summary: He couldn't believe it. You simply didn't get hailstones the size of footballs in London, and yet the clouds were dark, the sky stormy and the ice crashing down unrelenting. Arthur Kirkland sat huddled under a grimy stairwell of a grey estate, terrified, and stared at the blood pooling on the pavement in front of him.After the lightning crashed his world down, Arthur tries to figure out what the fuck is going on. He doesn't get very far.|| Misfits AU. Written for GerEng Week 2019, prompt: Fear ||
Relationships: England & Germany (Hetalia), England/Germany (Hetalia)
Kudos: 18





	Stricken

**Author's Note:**

> Although I wrote this for GerEng week I decided not to post it in the tag in the end cause I didn't think it featured Lud enough to count... For those who don't know Misfits, it's a British TV series that revolves around a group of young offenders who get hit by lightning in a freak storm and gain superhuman abilities. They then have the fun of trying to hide these abilities and get involved in all sorts of mishaps. There's also a murder and trying to cover up said murder. I recommend watching the first two seasons and probably not the rest.
> 
> Warnings: minor character death (not graphic), mention of weight issues/eating disorder and bad family relationships. So yeah here's Arthur getting hit by lightning.

For a moment the rotten back-end of Barnsgate-on-Thames held a collective breath as the sky turned tumultuous. The smashes of ice on the street set ablaze panic, most running quickly to shelter, others bravely (foolishly) attempting to record the freak storm, and others more standing stock still, unable to move out of fear or disbelief. It _was_ hard to believe. You simply didn't get hailstones the size of footballs in London. Hell, you hardly ever got hail. Slush or sleet was the way to go in the thick of January. But it wasn't January, and it wasn't even particularly cold. It was a bright(-ish) day and yet the clouds were dark and the hail was white-blue crashing down on cars and splitting pavement and the occasional skull, and Arthur Kirkland was huddled under a grimy stairwell of a grey estate, terrified, as blood pooled out of the concave head of his neighbour.

She had been a nice lady. Not that they'd spoken much, but she had always smiled, if a little absently, at Arthur whenever they'd crossed paths, and she played music a little too loudly through the walls (some kind of swing? fuck if he knew), and sometimes Arthur liked to listen to it to feel better huddled on his bed hating himself, and she sang sometimes too with her funny accent, and she hobbled along in her beige cardigan every Wednesday afternoon, without fail, to the shabby laundrette down the high street, then a little further to stare across less-than-green grass of the local "park", sitting on a bench and ignoring the coo of pigeons until her washing was done, and she had never commented on Arthur's weight.

Arthur's eyes prickled, and he blinked, realising he hadn't for some time as the noise and confusion continued, and he got shakily to his feet. She wasn't moving. He shuffled forward and leant down as if to shake her shoulder, as if to wake her, as if to check that the blood, redder than he thought it would look, was real, and that's when there was a huge spasm and a strange high-pitched _zing_ that crackled and he blacked out for a moment as he was flung backwards against the stairwell. He came to mere moments later (he wasn't sure exactly, but he figured it must have been because he heard a roll of thunder echoing away, and nothing else seemed to have changed) and the hail continued. His head swam and his back ached from the landing, but surprisingly he didn't feel worse. Or dead. Had he really just been hit by lightning? He blinked again and after a few more moments the storm seemed to clear, the evidence of their chaos strewn about the streets.

Arthur pushed himself upright and with another glance about himself, around the corpse, he ran back home.

-

The next day, Arthur didn't feel like eating. His mother praised him for that, and he'd thrown some sarcastic comment back at her then went out to smoke a fag.

He didn't feel like eating the next day either, and he didn't feel sick. Maybe it was shock. Perhaps grief did that to people. It felt weird to be feeling grief.

The day after that one was the funeral for Miss Héderváry. It seemed pretty quick. He reckoned it would have taken more time to organise, but then again what did he know. Why did he even care. He had asked, gruffly, the group of people swathed in black passing by the estate, where it would be held. Nearby. He asked if he could come and they gave him a once-over as if he were some shit on the kerb and didn't say anything else. Didn't matter, he could follow the hearse – they didn't exactly move fast.

He watched from a distance as things went on and on and on inside the church, but he didn't feel too tired. He bought a snickers in the interim (really who put a convenience store two minutes down the road from a church? then again he supposed priests must get hungry) but biting into it felt sickening, and he spat it out.

When the crowd began to disperse from the graveyard he felt a terrible ache inside of him, like something blocking his throat the way a gallstone would his bile duct, and he began to cry in great heaving breaths. Why did he even care so fucking much? A neighbour who hadn’t belittled him? His standards were low. He rubbed his eyes roughly.

Arthur left, taking great heavy strides to vent out the hurt, the embarrassment, and he shoved past someone in smoky grey, stumbling. He muttered a grim and spiteful curse at the fucker's expense, taking up too much space on the pavement, smack dab in the middle. It sort of backfired, and he followed through on the stumble starting to fall. He caught himself, still pretty stupidly, and bugger that fucking hurt.

"Are you alright?" Came the voice, neutral, polite, annoying.

He looked back with a glare. Tall, well-fitted coat, blue eyes coloured red.

"Fine," he huffed, and got to his feet.

The guy looked the same at his response, not pleased and reassured or even annoyed at being walked into. Arthur looked at him again. Had he been crying? "You alright?"

The man blinked. "Oh. Yes, fine. Did you know Miss Héderváry?"

Oh. Funeral attendee. Great. That made Arthur feel so much better about his recklessness. (Still, shouldn't have been taking up all the room).

"No," he said. And he hadn't, not really. Somehow, it just made him feel all fucked up that she'd be down there with a hole in her skull. That he’d been sitting on the stairs in everyone's way and that she had gave him a little smile and then the next moment she'd been on the ground. He coughed and felt tears again.

"Sir?"

"M'fine!" he said, rubbing his sleeve over his face again. He kept his eyes down to the ground.

The man shuffled, and with a small nod he stepped back a bit, probably too awkward to try and respond to that. Arthur realised that it had been very strange that he'd been called 'sir'.

He felt the brush of cool skin against his hand as they moved past him down the street, and Arthur stood there a moment, trying to calm down, and trying to imagine why he felt so worked up in the first place.

-

Arthur was knackered when he went home for some reason. He wasn't sure why. It hadn't been a very eventful day. He stared at the slimy home-made lasagne (to be fair it wasn't _too_ bad at the best of times, 'cept tonight it tasted fucking rank) half-eaten, half-tried.

He excused himself and went to the bathroom and threw up. He stared at the mess in the toilet bowl, black grime. He shook. What the fuck.

"What the fuck?" he echoed hoarsely. His blood ran cold. He flushed away the mess and marched to his room and went to sleep.

-

Something was seriously wrong.

Arthur hadn't eaten in a week, but somehow it didn't feel like it, and he was starting to get scared again. Normally when he felt scared, or like shit, he ate, and the repetitive chewing and crunch of a bowl of cereal at four in the afternoon, knowing full well dinner was to come, helped, but now when he tried it tasted like rot, and he wanted to vomit.

But he wasn't hungry. He thought about going to the doctor, but what would they say? Try eating? Would they send him to hospital? Fuck knows he didn't have time for that. They'd just tell him it was bad to starve himself, but good that he was eating less.

Fuck that.

But still, it worried him. He didn’t know what was happening. He wished he could hear that music through the walls. She was usually so predictable when it came to that time in the evening.

-

For some reason only Christ himself knew, Arthur was sitting in the launderette down the road, waiting here rather than pissing about doing nothing elsewhere, so that he could talk to his neighbour. It was silly, really, that she was the person he would turn to, that a lady he'd barey exchanged hellos with was someone he thought could comfort him. He wanted to tell someone. He wanted to beg someone. Anyone. Please tell me what the fuck is happening to me and why I feel sick when I eat and why I can't eat and why I don't feel any worse for not eating - ignoring the stress of it all of course. 

He sat there for hours, flicking on his phone to be sure he'd gotten the right day, then figured that she must not have much washing to do, and went home, leaving his cigarette snubbed outside the door. 

-

He went back there a week later.

Again he sat on the squeaky bench under dirty buzzing lamplight, staring idly at the drum spinning round and round and feeling his thoughts doing the same thing, churning in his head, trying to wring them out so he could get some sort of answer, when a voice insisted on removing him from that exercise in futility.

"Um, sir?"

He looked round in a daze. A man was staring at him oddly. He knew him. Where did he know him?

"What," he replied flatly.

"Your chocolate bar."

Arthur looked down at it, the wrapper squeezed tight between his fingers, and the chocolate itself melting slightly and smearing over his skin. Great. Ever since that storm his appetite was fucked. But that wasn't what was bugging him (well, not entirely). That's why he was here. Waiting. Again.

He scowled at the mess and wiped it on his jeans. The guy next to him made a noise of disdain, one Arthur was accustomed to hearing, though usually at the act of eating rather than discarding food.

He made to supply a snappy retort, but fell short looking at those clear blue eyes again.

"Do I know you?"

The man blinked, and then his eyes widened.

"Yeah, you were, um," Arthur continued, brows knitting together. Fuck, what was it again? It was déjà vu, looking at this guy. Like he had seen him before, knowing he hadn’t, but _knowing_ he had, somewhere. "Just the other… Um… Shit…" He rolled his lower lip between his teeth, trying to figure it out, and when he looked to the man for assistance he looked, well, terrified. Arthur blinked at him. That was weird. “Y'alright there?”

"You can't…" the man gulped. Actually, now that Arthur gave him a proper look-over (nice arms, great sturdy things, and an even nicer shoulder-to-waist ratio that sent a pang of spiteful jealousy and shame through him) he probably wasn’t an _adult_ adult. More like a twenty-year-old-not-a-dropout. "It doesn't matter."

Arthur's frustration grew, his confusion too, at the strange words.

"Look, do I know you or not?" he snapped.

"Yes," the younger adult said. His voice was low and sort of grumbly, and he, too, had a little accent. Too? Oh yeah, his neighbour - she spoke with an accent. It was weird that she _still_ wasn’t here, like normal, Wednesday afternoon and all that. This man’s accent, however, was dissimilar from hers. "We met after Miss Héderváry's funeral."

"Funeral?"

The man balked, and took a shuffling step back. Arthur felt the two of them hold a breath, together, in the dingy laundrette, as the washing machine beeped imploringly and lights buzzed louder and louder like flies were swarming from them. Arthur didn't understand. 

_Pleeeeease take the washing? Oh pleeeeeease?_

He felt the strange anxiety, the fear inside of him flare up – but also hope. Answers. That was better than ignorant comfort.

"Do you know me? Please, can you tell me what's happening to me?"

The guy sighed, unfroze, blinked, and sagged. It was a lot going on, and Arthur just wanted him to hurry up and answer already, but this was something, he was sure of it. It was too much of a coincidence.

"Yes, I think so. Were you in that storm the other week?"

"Yes."

The man nodded. "Okay. We should talk somewhere more private?"

Arthur's stomach rolled. Was it a bad idea to follow a six-foot-tall complete stranger (even though he was hot) to an undisclosed location on a whim? Absolutely. But he had nothing better to do, and he wanted answers.

"After you."

He was damn well going to get them.

**Author's Note:**

> Barnsgate-on-Thames is a made up town/estate located along the river Thames in London and bordering the equally-fictional Wertham, where Misfits is set. It was just easier than having to find a place that had all the locations and buildings I mentioned close to one another.
> 
> First part of a series (?) of undetermined length. There is at least two parts I know that much.


End file.
